Patrick Coleman, Eric Froemling
Abstract:
In Disney/Pixar's Ratatouille, the creation of believable
cooking environments with all their complexity has been an important
element in presenting a rich world that helps draw the audience into
the story. Part of that complexity arises in the preparation of food
before cooking. To create complex animations of food in preparation,
we designed a system that uses an animated cutting object,
such as a knife, to procedurally model, simulate, deform, and prepare
for shading various geometric food models as they are sliced,
chopped, peeled, or otherwise broken apart. The motion of a knife (or
other object) is analyzed relative to the food model to determine
a sequence of cutting operations that will remodel the object as a
collection of pieces. As each new piece is created, it is added to
a physical simulation to generate believable response motion. We
transfer surface shading parameterizations and scalar fields to
resulting
faces that correspond to surfaces on the original object, and we
generate additional scalar fields to assist users in shading new
internal surface faces. This approach to creating chopping effects
entirely dependent on an animated knife allows animators to focus on
character performance without needing to consider the complex
modeling and motion associated with chopping.
Paper (PDF)
Available as Pixar Technical Memo #07-13